An Undervalued Gift

In a world where games beep and TVs blare, the wordless picture book Float by Daniel Miyares emulates the silence of being alone in nature with one's own thoughts.

Interior from Float by Daniel Miyares

Readers get a sense of what the boy is thinking through his actions. He creates a boat from a sheet of newspaper, jumps in puddles and follows his boat along its path. We see the scope of his world in the reflection of a large puddle created by the rainstorm on which his boat sails. The boy's yellow slicker, hat and matching boots result in splashes of yoke-colored action across the otherwise variegated grays of the pages, acting as a golden spotlight on the young hero's progression.

Interior from Float by Daniel Miyares

When his boat goes down a drain and gets waterlogged, we watch the boy start over with another newspaper page and a new improvised mode of transport. He's completely content keeping his own company.

Summer camp, swimming lessons and art classes are wonderful organized activities. But the freedom to explore the world and be content in solitude is an undervalued gift.

Limitless Play

Yusuke Yonezu

 Moving Blocks by Yusuke Yonezu models for youngest children how creative they can be with basic block shapes: squares, circles, triangles, and rectangles. With minimal text, the pages show rather than tell examples of how children can construct the familiar things in their world and let their imaginations soar.

Yonezu uses predominantly primary colors (with the occasional touch of secondary color green) and bold black outlines to reveal the modes of transport children uses every day: a car, a bus, a train, ship, plane and rocket. Each page appears like a giant mosaic, a puzzle to be unlocked with the turn of a page. For each two-page spread of small blocks neatly fitted together into a giant rectangle, a die-cut hole reveals the hidden vehicle on the next page, and a telltale sound provides another clue ("Sssssh, big doors opening... It's a bus"). The stark-white background helps young eyes easily distinguish the colorful bus on the page.

Interior from Moving Blocks

These are blocks that move, and the answers children discover from page to page move people from place to place. Yonezu proves that the simpler he keeps the ideas, the more possibilities they open up in the imagination of a child.

Play

Hervé Tullet turned the world on its ear with Press Here. It was executed with such genius simplicity, that we all wondered why it had never been done before. With Mix It Up!, he holds to that simplicity and does for color what Press Here did for gravity.

Mo Willems (l.) and Herve Tullet in Bryant Park
Photo: Meg Parsont/Phaidon Press

The way Tullet plays with cause and effect is eye-opening for any child--from 1 to 92. And "play" is the key word. "Play is the work of childhood," wrote Jean Piaget in his Dreams, and Imitation in Childhood (W. W. Norton, 1962). Through play, a child learns how to resolve conflict, how to negotiate, when to lead and when to step back.

Tullet teaches, through play, what happens when you mix two colors (a new hue emerges), turn a book on its side (the paint runs down the page), and when the child places a hand on the page (you leave an impression). When Tullet and Mo Willems spoke together at New York's Books of Wonder in April 2013, they talked about the importance of play in their own work. "I want my books to be played, not to be read," said Willems, best known for his Pigeon picture books and his Elephant and Piggie beginning readers. 

Both author-artists said they draw in order to free themselves. Isn't that play? Neither author admitted to getting stuck ever, nor are they afraid of getting stuck. Tullet quoted a jazz musician who once said that improvisation feels like falling, but you never actually fall. Willems said that each evening, he and his family and any dinner guests on hand all gather around the dining room table where they stretch a giant piece of paper and draw. His dining room walls have a chalkboard surface so they can draw there, too. 

Tullet and Willems prove that the best work comes out of play. It's true for children; why shouldn't it be true for adults?

Books to Play By

Tickle by Leslie Patricelli is a board book that inspires participation. The toddler essentially dares someone to try and make him or her laugh with the statement, "I am NOT ticklish."

Of course, Dad the Tickle Monster must prove his baby wrong. This simply begs that the reading experience between child and parent or grandparent or older sibling also devolve into a ticklefest.

Interior from Tickle

On the page where all of the toddler's ticklish body parts are labeled, that same parent or grandparent or older sibling will similarly follow with "Are you ticklish on your belly button? Your knees? Your toes?" It's a fun way for a toddler to learn the names for all the parts of his or her person while also being lovingly tended to by a trusted caregiver.

Board books that invite interaction are a wonderful way for children to associate books with laughter, play and imagination. Patricelli's Tickle leads nicely into other interactive books, such as Nina Laden's Peek-a-Who?, Taro Gomi's Peekaboo!, The Baby Goes Beep by Rebecca O'Connell, illustrated by Ken Wilson-Max, and William Steig's Pete's a Pizza--books that also inspire pretending and playing together.

Reading is not a passive experience, these books demonstrate to youngest children; books are a way to get involved, whether physically (as with Tickle and the other aforementioned board books) or emotionally and imaginatively, as they get older and begin to read fairy tales and other stories.

Active Imagination

For Lucy, the little fox who stars in Red Wagon by Renata Liwska, the stress is on the “active” in “active imagination.” As she takes an action (going to the market on an errand for her mother), she uses her surroundings to feed her fantasy and transform a chore into a pleasurable experience. It starts to rain, and Lucy imagines the red wagon as a ship, and rescues a raccoon pirate. We see all of her friends joining in to play a part.

When we were kids, we often staged plays in which everyone took a part, helped figure out the scenery and props, created makeshift costumes from castoff clothes or old sheets. We’d go exploring in the woods and build lean-to forts from large branches and sizable pieces of fiberglass we’d find. We’d make igloos after a large snowfall. Our parents would say, “Go outside and get some fresh air and exercise.” That’s what Lucy and her friends are doing. They’re exercising their imaginations along with their bodies, and each of them takes a role in the imagined scenes.

As a huge fan of technology, I recognize how it has freed me up in myriad ways, given me access to quantities of information in a moment that in the past would have taken hours to compile, and it allows me to stay in touch with people on the other side of the country. But as a former teacher, I do wonder if children get away from the computer and TV and their electronic games often enough, to go outside and play--exercise their minds in a different way, spontaneously making connections and choices in concert with other children. Even Albert Einstein took his dog for long walks.

Lucy demonstrates that we need very little to create a big adventure. She turns what could have been a dreary errand into an exciting journey, and inspires all of us to do the same in our own lives.

Permission to Play

William Carlos Williams’ ability both to run a full-time medical practice and also to devote daily time to his writing is one of the things I admire most about him. The other, of course, is the quality of his writing, his ability to see and describe the exquisite details in everyday things. The movements of a bird outside his window, the taste of a sweet plum from the icebox, the clangs, siren, howls and rumbling wheels of a red fire truck. When I read A River of Words, I realized that those two characteristics—his talent for balancing work and creativity, and also for noticing and describing his experience—probably both stem from the many hours he spent walking beside the banks of the Passaic River.

During my first year of teaching elementary school in New York City in the late 1980s, I was shocked to learn about “play dates.” Parents called each other to schedule a “date” for their children to play together. I guess that makes sense, I thought. New York is a big city and you have to plan for transportation, and you certainly have to know where your child is. But I thought of my own carefree afternoons growing up in Dearborn (and later Kalamazoo), Michigan. Our neighborhood was much like the setting in Gran Torino, little lots close together—you could practically call out the window and get a game of kickball together. A bunch of us would walk back from school together at age 6 and 7, maybe stop home to change clothes and grab a snack, but then we’d meet in the front yard with our bikes or bats and balls. The afternoons seemed to stretch delightfully endlessly to dinnertime. There was a spontaneity to our play that seems harder to tap into today.

Many of my friends have preserved that for their children. But they’ve had to work at not scheduling their children's time too tightly, allowing them room to play in the yard or go to the neighborhood park. They’ve had to limit the lessons and practices and time in front of the TV or computer. Even as adults it’s sometimes hard to give ourselves permission to “procrastinate now,” as Ellen DeGeneres advises. My friend Elmera often says, “I constantly have to remind myself that I’m a human being, not a human doing.”

William Carlos Williams, by his example, shows us there’s room for both doing and being.